In anticipation of the annual Vogue Summer School in New York City. Teen Vogue launched the first-ever Teen Vogue X Vogue Summer School essay contest, offering a full scholarship to one winner.
The prompt was to tell us about one item of clothing that really means something to you, whether it's about identity, family, or anything else. Out of nearly 500 entrants, and so many incredible pieces of writing, Keon Etminan's essay about a t-shirt gifted to him by his father was chosen as the winner. As Keon writes, a piece of clothing can be about so much more than just an outfit; it can speak to your whole heritage.
Read the full essay below, and congratulations, Keon!
Hidden Layers by Keon Etminan
The morning I left for the United States Senate page program in Washington, DC, my father put an undershirt on my bed and said, “Wear this first.”
It was a white, crewneck, 100% cotton shirt, the kind that comes folded into hard little rectangles. Nothing about it looked important. It cost a few dollars at a Persian grocery store 40 minutes from our house. But my father set it down carefully, like he was handing me something more serious than clothing.
He has always bought the same undershirts. Before that, my grandfather bought them in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar from a vendor he knew by name. That detail has followed me my whole life: He knew the vendor by name.
I think that matters because, in my family, buying something has never been only about the thing. My father tells stories about the Bazaar the way other people talk about old family friends. When my father came to America, he found a Persian market that sold the same undershirts, and he kept buying them, year after year, from a man who had also left Iran. Then, without ever making a speech about it, my father started buying them for me. For a long time, I thought they were just undershirts. Useful. Plain. Easy to forget.
Then I went to Washington.
The Senate is full of things meant to be seen: dark suits, polished shoes, marble floors, flags, lapel pins, careful language. Everything looks intentional. Everything looks like it means something. Under my suit, though, I was wearing the same soft white cotton my grandfather wore in Tehran and my father wore in Houston. That mattered to me more than I expected.
One day, I was standing in a hallway listening to adults talk about Iran in the tidy, official language people use when world events are happening to somebody else. I was taking notes and trying to look competent, but all I could think about was how strange it is that people can sound so distant from one another while being, at the most basic level, so physically alike. Under the wool jackets and the security badges and the rhetoric, everyone is just a person trying to get through the day in a body that bruises, overheats, gets tired, wants comfort, wants home.
I thought about my aunt in Tehran, opening a drawer to find the same white cotton undershirts, my father as a boy watching his father buy them. I thought about the absurd smallness of this thing that connected all of us: not a grand idea, not a language, not even a slogan, but a simple layer of fabric between skin and the rest of the world.
Later, someone asked me what people in Iran are actually like, and I knew the kind of answer he expected. Something geopolitical. Something neat. Instead, I said my grandfather bought his undershirts from a man he knew by name, and my father found the same kind in America and never stopped buying them. I said that people are more recognizable to one another by way of ordinary habits, rather than in headlines. The room changed a little. Enough for me to feel it.
That night I called my family, and they asked me what American politicians were actually like. I could have given them a cynical answer (there were plenty available). But I said something else. I said that before the speeches, before the cameras, before the arguments, they were also someone’s children. They had bodies that got cold, fathers who taught without explaining, and mirrors in which they wondered whether they looked ready for the room they were about to walk into.
My cousin laughed—the kind of laugh that happens when something far away suddenly feels close enough to touch.
That is what the undershirt means to me. It reminds me that most of what makes us human is hidden. Fashion is the part people see; the undershirt represents the part they do not. The first layer. The private one. The one that sits closest to the skin and asks nothing except to be soft, reliable, and there.
I like that it is not an impressive garment. It is not tailored or rare or expensive. The collar curls a little after enough washes. The cotton thins over time. It does not announce anything about me to the world. But maybe that is why it says so much. My father did not give it to me as a sentimental object; he gave it to me as instructions. Start here. Begin with what is true. Then put on whatever the world requires.
I have six of these undershirts now, folded in my drawer. Every morning I pull one on before anything else. It is such a small act that it would be easy to dismiss, except I no longer think small acts are small. A person leaves one country, another person follows, a son grows up in Texas, and somehow the same white cotton keeps passing from hand to hand. What survives in a family is not always its grandest stories. Sometimes it is its rituals. Sometimes it is the way love disguises itself as practicality. Sometimes it is an undershirt.
Mine will never be the part of the outfit anyone remembers. It is not meant to be. Its whole purpose is to sit quietly beneath outward appearance and hold something steadier under it. That is why I love it. In a world so organized around surface impressions, it reminds me that the truest things are often the least visible: what people wear closest to their skin; what they carry from home without announcing it; and how, under our different costumes, countries, and convictions, we all begin the day as human beings, reaching for something gentle to put on first. The stories we choose to tell about those hidden layers are exactly the kind I want to bring into every space I enter, whether it’s a marble hallway in Washington or a future room I haven’t walked into yet.
